British politicians enjoy lecturing their continental European counterparts on the virtues of a deregulated and flexible economy.
But on the subject of what the flexible economy is supposed to deliver, namely superior company performance and productivity, they fall strangely silent.
This is because, measured by output per hour, the UK still lags rather than leads. Recent figures show that in 2004 US workers added 34 percent more value per hour than their UK counterparts, Germans 11 percent more, and the French 25 percent more.
This frustrates and perplexes ministers and their aides, who have spent the last 30 years using the UK as a testbed for a no-alternative economic experiment in the abovementioned flexibility and deregulation, only to find that while the macroeconomic levers they can pull do affect productivity, it's the microeconomic processes inside companies that they can't reach -- at least not directly -- that matter more. It's not the economy: it's management, stupid.
Reinforcement for this view comes from a new report from the London School of Economics' (LSE) Center for Economic Performance, McKinsey & Co and Stanford University entitled "Management Practice and Productivity: Why They Matter," which supports the common-sense notion that the way firms are managed is one of the most important ways of distinguishing between them.
Scoring 4,000 medium-sized European, Asian and US manufacturing companies on the quality of their operations, performance and talent management, the report suggests that, as with productivity, the UK is in the second league for management, behind the top tier of the US, Sweden, Japan and Germany, alongside France, Italy and Poland, and ahead of the dunces of Greece, India and China.
However, these figures conceal some interesting subtexts.
The difference in national averages is largely accounted for by the "tail" of badly run firms -- on the chosen criteria, 8 percent of UK companies fall into this category compared with 2 percent in the US. In India, 20 percent of companies are badly run, yet the best Indian firms are a match for anyone. Multinationals operating in India, for example, are among the best-managed anywhere, with the top 30 percent of Indian firms being better managed than the average in the UK. As the researchers note, combined with low labor costs, this makes them formidable competitors, irrespective of national averages.
Ownership matters, too. Multinationals, particularly US ones, are the best managed everywhere. Interestingly, private-equity-owned firms aren't notably better managed than the UK average and are less well managed than the top tier of national leaders, multinationals and firms under dispersed shareholder ownership. So much for the supposed performance advantages conferred by their governance arrangements.
The researchers argue that the study is good news for companies, "suggesting that they have access to dramatic improvements in performance simply by adopting good practices used elsewhere."
For policymakers, the challenge is harder -- getting the good-practice message across to the poor-performing tail that brings the average down.
But not so fast. In a kind of infinite regression, complementary research in progress under the aegis of the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM) hints that "adopting good practices used elsewhere" is anything but simple.
That is because managers are astonishingly bad at assessing their own performance. More than 85 percent of managers in the LSE study believed their company was better managed than the average, and self-assessed scores "have almost no link" with firm performance or the marks awarded by the researchers.
More broadly, the AIM research identifies the context for good practice as critical. Indirect support for that comes from the LSE finding that although there are relative differences in national scores (the UK scores well for people management and less well for operations, for example), "no single dimension provides the key for improved management performance" -- good firms are well managed across all performance aspects. The implication is that a firm can't just import an attractive practice: It has to have the underpinnings in place to support it -- including the awareness that it is needed in the first place.
So when it is said that British managers are notoriously reluctant to adopt promising practices, this is true but not very helpful, tantamount to saying that the UK is not very good at management.
To break out of the circle of inertia, the key seems to be to get managers looking both outward -- as much to customers as to other companies to get an accurate bearing on their real competitive position; and inward -- to develop their own "signature" practices, based on their own values and history, that will distinguish them from others in the eyes of customers.
As with fruit and vegetables, home-grown is best.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS